The Sleep Watcher

Description

'A bracing and compelling portrayal of adolescence and feeling uncanny at home. Rowan Hisayo Buchanan is one of the most distinctive and luminously original novelists of her generation' Sharlene Teo 'Elegant, atmospheric, sharp-edged . . . The Sleep Watcher is a novel that obsessed me from the moment I opened the cover' Cal Flyn When she is sixteen, Kit suffers a summer of peculiar sleeplessness. Her body lies in bed while she wanders through her family home, the streets of her run-down seaside town and into the houses of friends and strangers. Unseen and unheard, she witnesses her parents and their fracturing relationship. Her home thrums with quiet violence that she can no longer ignore. With this secret knowledge it becomes impossible not to react and a single choice soon changes everything. Intimate, tense and exquisitely observed, The Sleep Watcher is a moving portrait of family, danger and guilt, captured through the strange summer heat of adolescence. 'The writing is incredibly beautiful and unbearably tense... It is exquisite.' Ruth Gilligan, author of The Butchers 'An incredibly moving story about connection, loneliness, and what we do when we think no one else is watching' Julianne Pachico

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan is a Japanese-British-Chinese-American writer. Her debut novel, Harmless Like You, was published in 2016 and won the Author's Club First Novel Award and a Betty Trask award. It was also shortlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize, the Books Are My Bag Breakthrough Author Award and longlisted for the Jhalak Prize. Her writing has appeared in the anthologies East Side Voices, How Much the Heart Can Hold and Spiritus Mundi among others, as well as the Guardian, New York Times, Granta, The Paris Review and The Atlantic among other places. She has lived in London, New York, Tokyo, Madison and Norwich.

The Sleep Watcher simmers with tension and a constant threat of violence - and yet it is so delicately and cleanly observed as to make reading a pleasure. A pitch-perfect evocation of coming of age in a seaside town - with all the freedom and risk that comes of growing up among flawed and fractured adults. Elegant, atmospheric, sharp-edged . . . it is a novel that obsessed me from the moment I opened the cover. -- Cal Flyn, author of Islands of Abandonment With agonising precision, The Sleep Watcher captures that estranging moment of young womanhood when you suddenly realise your body, your parents, your whole world is nothing like you thought. The writing is incredibly beautiful and unbearably tense - I had to hold my breath as I read. It is exquisite. -- Ruth Gilligan, author of The Butchers Charged with the otherworldliness and shrewd social perception found in the works of Shirley Jackson and Octavia Butler, The Sleep Watcher is a bracing and compelling portrayal of adolescence and feeling uncanny at home. Rowan Hisayo Buchanan is one of the most distinctive and luminously original novelists of her generation and I'll read anything she writes. -- Sharlene Teo The Sleep Watcher is a taut and vicious thrum of a novel, deceptively pretty and mesmerising as the calm before a storm. Rowan Hisayo Buchanan cuts close to the bone with her insights on family and secrecy, trust and power, and the dangerous, double-edged keenness of intimacy -- C Pam Zhang, author of How Much of These Hills Is Gold In her uncanny central conceit Buchanan has hit on a perfect metaphor for the estrangement of adolescence. The Sleep Watcher is a beguiling, atmospheric work, at once wary and tender, of how we haunt our parents and how they in turn possess us. -- Peter Ho Davies An incredibly moving story about connection, loneliness, and what we do when we think no one else is watching. Beautifully written - Buchanan's prose has a brilliantly sensitive touch. -- Julianne Pachico Buchanan has written a beautiful book. In The Sleep Watcher she manages to a tell a story that is ethereal and other-worldly while being heart-breakingly human. We are lucky to have her unique voice. -- Paul McVeigh In elegant and restrained prose, the novel charts one young woman's summer of heat and dreams, of longing and rebellion, of relationships deteriorating and new experiences rising. No one is writing about the interior worlds of women like Rowan Hisayo Buchanan. The Sleep Watcher is an astonishing achievement, in which ordinary life and a magnificent unreality collide. I loved it. -- Gemma Seltzer, author of Ways of Living I absolutely adored The Sleep Watcher. It is so finely wrought - with an aching, delicate beauty and suspense -- Jessica J. Lee Slippery, luminous, ethereal . . . like finding sea glass at the beach. Hisayo Buchanan writes like a dream, only this time her subject is also dreams, liminal spaces, adolescence on the brink of adulthood, sleep that skirts the rim of waking, what is real about her father at the creeping dawn of a young woman's realisation. She is my favourite contemporary writer -- Abigail Tarttelin